


The Oath

by Falke



Category: Zootopia (2016)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Minor Character Death, Minor Original Character(s), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-05
Updated: 2016-09-05
Packaged: 2018-08-13 05:03:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7963474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Falke/pseuds/Falke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>I, Nicholas Wilde, promise to be brave, loyal, helpful and trustworthy.</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Brave

Nicholas Wilde was eleven years old the last night he talked to his mother: old enough to understand what was happening - but, he would decide later, too young to appreciate it.

She sent all the nurses out of the room, sometime way past his bedtime, he was sure, and it was just them. Him perched in his chair, and her sitting up in her bed, and the beep and whir of the medical machines. His paw in hers. She was as strong and present as ever. But something had changed. Something smelled different.

"The doctors say I have to stay here, Nicky."

"How long?"

"A few more days, at least. You can stay with me, if you want."

"But what about school?"

"Your teachers know you're here with me. I talked to them yesterday, remember?"

She had his paw with some focus he hadn't noticed before, not even when they'd arrived here in their neighbor's car yesterday afternoon.

"I want to be in bed. At home. This one isn't the same."

"I know, sweetheart." His mother smiled at him. "We can go back soon."

"Promise?"

She squeezed his paw even tighter, and her eyes crinkled at the corners. Nick had to look away from the tear rolling down her cheek.

"You know what those mean now," she said. "Promises. You remember what I taught you."

"A promise-" Nick frowned. He did remember this. "A promise is the most important thing you can give someone else."

She nodded and recited the rest along with him. " _Backed by the full faith of your entire relationship with a person._ I want you to remember that, Nicky. Your whole life."

And she made him promise to, right there in the hospital ward. To keep going. To stay in school. To stay out of trouble. He knew what it meant, in some abstract way. That she was talking to him while she still could. Preparing him for when he'd have to be strong all on his own, for the first time. When he would have to survive.

He'd promised her that, too, even though that future scared him.

"How will I know I can do it? If-" Nick had to swallow the lump in his throat. "If I can't ask you for help?"

She drew a deep, long breath. "Everyone meets that moment, Nicky. And none of us ever know if we can handle it, until we try."

 _"Mom."_ Her tears were infectious. Nick let them be.

"I love you more than _anything_ , Nicky. And I know how smart you are. I know you'll learn."

But Nick had to wonder if he'd promised to do more than he could. He didn't feel very strong, not right then, when the subtle, massive change brought him out of fitful sleep at her side later that night. When all he could feel was desperate, bone-deep helplessness, that made him shrink into the corner of the little lobby outside, because none of the doctors knew what to do with him. They wouldn't tell him what he already knew, even when he asked.

He spent his first night truly alone in the world under the cold fluorescent lights of the hospital waiting room, and didn't sleep again.

The second, and the third, and the fourth night - he had a real bed again, but it was an unfamiliar one in the foster home that wasn't his, that didn't feel right. He slept there anyway. Made the effort, for his mother's sake, to fit in and make the best of what he had. He'd promised.

And each night, when Nick couldn't help the tears, the creeping knowledge that no, he wasn't brave enough to do this himself - he still tried. He didn't want any of them to see.


	2. Loyal

She was a seventeen-year-old vixen named Cassie Lively, and Nick figured her out the hard way.

By the time he was sixteen, she'd been around the foster home for a year and a half, and in that time she'd talked him into worse and worse. Nick had gone along with more than he should have, simply because Cassie was a fox, a similar soul, and because the streets were better distraction than school or the meager, repetitive activities of the Sunrise home. After school they would meet up, at the edge of the worn athletic track, and strike out into the city.

Whenever he wanted to disappear for a while, Cassie was ready. Soon the jaunts lasted days, to the detriment of a school schedule Nick found increasingly boring. But he would rather cruise around the city than waste time in a foster system that never seemed to have any good sides. He didn't want to sit through literature courses, or deal with the collective attention of an entire building full of suspicious mammals. He especially didn't want to talk to the lawyer who kept writing him about his mother. He didn't want that reminder.

They amused themselves in public spaces - and lurked in private ones past curfew, instead of returning to the shelter. They would explore rooftops, or sneak around lawns in the suburbs to hide from the evening patrols. It was much more exciting than the shelter, and as time went on they fell into an easy rhythm together, going long stretches without talking because it was simply enough to have someone else who understood a little bit. He enjoyed her company.

It started to get deeper as their friendship went on, a little more personal. Nick was familiar enough with the concept of romance - or lust, in this case - to recognize it for what it was. She was just a bit too generous with her tail now, the one that made him restless every time she wrapped it idly around him or flicked it at his muzzle.

But that tail was a distraction, too. A tool to draw attention. And while he'd never seen it happen, Nick started to suspect there was a little bit more to Cassie than he'd expected.

Their weekly stipend covered enough for a few meals if they pooled the cash, but sometimes Cassie would turn up more money than she should have had. Normally, Nick didn't ask and she didn't tell.

Until they were working on the really nice fish tacos from a brand-new artsy place in Canyonlands for the fourth night in a row, and he had to know.

"Where did you get enough for such good food so often?"

"Around."

"Come on, Cassie."

"I'm sharing, aren't I?"

"And you wouldn't be leaning on Sunrise Foster Care the rest of the time if you didn't have to," Nick said. "What gives?"

Her tail swished behind her in the chair. "I'm getting by. You are, too."

"On whose dime, though?" He had a feeling. "Not yours."

Her tail kept going, and she kept chewing. The silence dragged.

"Are you stealing it, Cassie?"

_"Diverting."_

Nick looked down at the taco in his paw.

"Diverting from where?"

"No one who will miss it. Well-off folks who watch me go by the first time, or businessmammals too distracted by their phones to pay proper attention to their briefcases." Cassie scratched her muzzle. "I'll never understand who needs to stare at a screen twenty-four hours a day."

"And that makes it okay?" Nick put his taco down. "You're going to get hurt."

"You're reaping the spoils here, too."

"Not anymore, I'm not." Nick stood and looked down the street. It was a nicer part of town, but now that he knew how and why Cassie had brought them here he wasn't comfortable at all. It took him a moment to settle into the mask he'd adopted, the one he hid behind when the stress and the loneliness got to be too much. When he realized how different things were from when he was a kit. "I was fine with apples and peanut butter."

Cassie watched him for a long minute, until she reached over and picked up his discarded food. "That backbone's not going to keep you fed."

She wasn't wrong.

\---

Worse, she kept trying to draw him in.

Three weeks it went on - she would vanish for a while, and turn up with cash, jewelry, even car keys one time, which Nick made her throw into the river at the boardwalk. She ate like a queen with the ill-gotten gains, and Nick would sit across the table from her and watch and try not to drool. Ever since that first night he'd asked, the idea of benefiting from something so underhanded - so legitimately shifty and wrong - left him without an appetite.

An article appeared in the Zootopia Times. It was little more than a footnote on the crime blotter, a string of related incidents with a subadult vixen as the mammal of interest - but Cassie derived some twisted pleasure from it. She waved the paper under his nose. Used it as some justification or motivation to continue. Some proof that something was happening with their lives, never mind that that something was ominous and getting worse.

She wanted him to help her. To be lookout while she fleeced tourists, or to be ready with a disguising coat or a hat when she arrived out of breath, still checking over her shoulder for pursuit. Nick agreed to each - once - and the same queasy feeling in his stomach started to show up then, too.

Eventually they were in city center for the night, and it hadn't come up for a couple days. But Cassie was even better than Nick was at reading the crowds out here, and the way her tail was going meant she was up to something. Nick headed it off.

"Whatever it is, I'm not interested. You shouldn't be, either. This can't keep going."

"So sure so quickly." Her tail flipped in his face.

"Quit it," Nick said, and pushed it away. "I know what you're doing, Cassie. It's not worth it, even if the police station wasn't right there. There are better opportunities. Safer ones."

She snorted. "Okay, Mr. entrepreneur, what would you do?"

"I don't know. But if we're going to get cash through questionable methods, at least let mammals part with it willingly. You're less likely to get arrested that way."

"Like anyone's ever going to trust a fox. They'll assume you're running some sort of hustle, which it sounds like you would be." Cassie studied him. "You going to start melting down ice cream and selling it to hamsters or something?"

"Sounds safer than whatever you're planning," Nick said.

"Sounds like a ton of work for almost no reward," she said, and jerked a thumb at the open-air park behind them. "This is a cakewalk, Nick. There's a concert tonight, and everyone's checking their bags at the valet station because they can't take them onto the grounds."

He knew what she was planning, but he asked anyway. "So?"

"So we'll be set for weeks. Look, all I need is your eyes. You don't have to do the hard part. Just sit here and wave me off if you see trouble coming. Watch my back."

There were times - and they were rarer and rarer now - when Nick got moments of perspective. When the need to do something, _anything_ to distract himself from the realities of his situation ceded ground to what he'd known since he'd started life alone.

He'd made a promise to the most important person in that short life, that he would learn how to survive on his own. He knew this wasn't how he was supposed to do it. But he wasn't going to get Cassie to understand it that way. It didn't matter that this wasn't necessary to her survival, much less his. She was going to do it anyway, and if it went poorly-

He tried one last time. "I still don't want to see you get hurt, Cassie. This has to stop."

"You don't think I can do it?"

"It's not about _bravado_." Nick gritted his teeth. "If you do this - promise me it's the last time. Promise me you'll stop, before you ruin things for both of us."

"You know the signal."

She'd taught it to him, even when he didn't want to learn it. Nick nodded and rubbed a paw against the back of his neck - her cue that the coast was clear, and the panic sign if things started to go wrong.

She started to drift across the street. "I'll meet you two blocks south."

Nick sat on the edge of the planter and watched his only friend leave, and something in him knew it was going to be for good.

_For the best._

Had he applied himself enough? He could still talk her out of it, or at least stall it off. He didn't have to play along. She wouldn't be reckless enough to ignore his caution tonight, not when they were close enough to see mammals moving around inside the lobby of ZPD's precinct one headquarters.

Until the time she did ignore it, and Nick knew eventually she would. This wasn't going to change until something forced her out of it. Until then, it was only going to get worse, and the risk of Nick getting caught up in it too would climb along with it.

Twice she looked over at him, and twice - because he was still coming to grips with it - he tore his guilty eyes from the police station across the way and kept his paws in his lap. _Don't move yet._

He'd given Cassie her chance to stop before it was too late. She'd had the opportunity to make a promise - to _mean_ something - and she'd let it slide right by.

That had to mean something, too.

So Nick sat, and refused to cooperate. Cassie grew increasingly agitated - he could see that in her tail from here - and very nearly bailed out of the whole thing at least once. It was some contest of wills, one she meant to win. But Nick was playing something different. He just intended to survive.

It was coincidence. Completely out of their control, and probably impossible to see coming even if he had been playing along. This close to their headquarters, there was bound to be more police traffic. The cruiser made a leisurely turn toward them on Nick's left, down at the end of the block. The windows were open. Nick could see the wolf and the rhino inside chatting.

Cassie, her eyes on the ranks of loosely-attended backpacks and purses, didn't. Not until it was pulling alongside. The wolf at the wheel glanced out. Double-took. The car stopped.

Nick couldn't see past it, but then he didn't really need to. He slipped off his bench seat and walked away, and tried to ignore the guilt he knew he shouldn't have to feel.

He could know someone for years, and learn in the course of a few short weeks that even those he thought he understood could still push a wedge through a relationship. He supposed he was lucky, this time, that the problem was so quickly self-corrected.

And for a time, he lost much of his taste for unsupervised adventuring in the city. He returned to what passed for home now, and let Cassie fade as quickly as she'd appeared in his life.


	3. Helpful

They'd called his name, just one year late. Nick had to be happy with that milestone himself, because no one else was going to be. His counselor, Anne, had worked more closely with him than any of her other students, and she was the one handing him his high school diploma. She didn't have paws free for applause.

Even for a school right next to Happytown, poster community for incomplete families and missed opportunity, the deafening silence had hurt more than Nick expected it to.

But he'd done it. Finished. He kept his face straight, walking across that stage.

And now that it was over Nick didn't know what came next. In their last few meetings, Anne had talked earnestly about trade school. She'd given him pamphlets and phone numbers and email contacts. He had a whole stack of possibility in his locker under his bed at Sunrise, but Nick didn't like his chances. You needed resources for education, and his were about used up. No job. No experience. Next year he'd be too old for Sunrise. They'd kick him out. Sympathetically, sure, but that would be it.

He would be old enough to take over the deed to his mother's house if he wanted, but that lead had vanished into the legal ether when the lawyer had stopped calling. Nick didn't know what that meant. Maybe he wasn't getting paid anymore. Maybe his practice had gone under.

The house didn't mean as much to him as it used to, either. He'd visited every once in a while, to stand across the street and stare through the windows that weren't boarded up, and wonder. His room was probably just as he'd left it that afternoon his mother called him downstairs for the last time, in that scared, stern voice that meant she wasn't in a mood for argument.

But he'd stopped that, too. Chasing it down would be more trouble than it was worth. He wouldn't have to money to keep the place up anyway.

It didn't leave much.

\---

Three more years on and Nick was looking at low points that just kept getting lower. The paper route - _a paper route!_ \- had dried up, and had lasted longer than he'd expected anyway. The temp messenger agency wanted someone with a bicycle, and finding one for a mid-scale mammal was too expensive to consider. He was only barely going to make rent this month as it was.

It was legalized crime, really. The room was an apartment in only the most technical definition of the term, and anything cheaper than that was going to be made of tin roofing and hope. It still cost him two hundred a month. And he paid it. Hadn't missed a deadline yet.

Next month he might, though. Unless he got creative. The popsicle thing kept bothering him - food vendors did okay, all things considered, and if it was that or nothing, he'd take it. He'd had to eat at the shelter a few times, and wouldn't go back if he could help it. It smelled of dead end, and everyone there looked at the fox like he was somehow _worse_ than dead end. A service to help those without options, and it still treated him as suspicious. Untrustworthy.

He was on his way back from the old landlord's P.O. box, trying to figure out if he had enough left to afford an actual dinner tonight, and this part of the city was in full swing. The Happytown border was a long, long shot from the warm, clean night lights of Canyonlands, where he'd spent so much time before.

Fish tacos would really hit the spot.

Instead, he was detouring all the way onto the cracked blacktop to duck some absolutely _snarling_ fight that spilled onto the sidewalk, when a big lioness bodily threw a hyena out onto someone's flowerbed.

"You told me you changed, Zeke. You promised you were done."

He was picking himself up. The purple blossoms were flattened and smashed. "The fuck does it matter? You suddenly never cared until it was your tail sitting out-"

She cut him off. Nick sped up his pace, to get around the corner before the lioness could finish describing exactly what she was going to do with her claws if Zeke showed up again.

That was him. The fox nobody saw or bothered with. He'd honed that mindset. He kept his head down and his ears up, and he was getting by - or was at least in a long, slow decline that he could maybe still turn around. It beat the spirals of violence and literal broken promise he saw so many around him take. Whatever it was that tripped them up hadn't gotten to him yet.

Some justification. Nice and poetic, from this side. _Stability_ was just another word for _rut_.

He watched a lone zebra make her way down the sidewalk toward him. Aside from the fight winding down behind him they seemed to be the only two out on the street. She was looking at her phone, and at the surrounding homes and ratty shops. She even made brief eye contact. Lost, probably. The maps never could keep up with how fast things turned over down here. And she wasn't from the neighborhood. Locals didn't need maps - and they didn't wave their phones around, either.

And then, damn his luck, she made up her mind about something and came right up to him. Nick smelled expensive perfume.

"Sorry to bother you," she said, and Nick saw her decide against the _'sir.'_ "Do you know where Emporia is? My map is no good."

It was an antique shop. Who braved Happytown lite for an _antique shop?_

"You're three blocks too far west," Nick said, letting all of it bounce off. He pointed. "Back that way and then go north. There's a shortcut between Ridgeback and Slate, but I'd skip it this time of night. Not safe."

She raised a cultivated eyebrow at that last part, but she nodded. "Thank you."

It sent her back down the street ahead of him. Nick took his time, just to get some distance from the stranger, and found he had enough on him for a couple of apples from the little corner stand. There was probably still enough peanut butter stuck to the sides of his last jar at home to make it work.

He rounded the corner in time to see a zebra tail disappearing into the alley between Ridgeback Road and Slate Boulevard. He rolled his eyes. A straight warning from a local, and nothing. Whatever. It was her backside.

The problem - and it became immediately apparent - was that a couple of other characters out here were thinking the same thing already. There were two lanky wolves sitting on a stoop across the road from the alley, and as Nick approached they stopped watching and got up to cross. One of them vanished in the alley mouth.

Nick wasn't stupid. He knew a terrible situation when he saw one, and this was all the incentive he needed to turn around and take the long way home.

Except he felt irrationally responsible for what this _tourist_ had decided to do. For what might be about to happen to her. There was no question of him getting involved. Not when even these underfed grifters had eight times his mass between them. But the police could. Maybe even in time, if he acted quickly. He could stop something.

But the other wolf was staring, straight at Nick. He felt his hackles shift. It was a canid thing: they were close enough now that Nick caught the other's scent, which meant he was as good as identified, too - and that ominous guarantee suddenly turned this from a matter of intervention back into one of survival. Nick had only made it this long down here precisely because he didn't attract attention. Because no one knew who he was. Because he didn't stick his neck out.

He carried on down the block automatically, eyes down, and wished it were as easy not to look head on at what that meant. It seemed even this wasn't enough to jar him out of what he'd turned into.

He wasn't hungry when he got home. He put the apples on the shelf next to the almost-empty peanut butter, stretched out on the beaten futon and stared at the ceiling.

Sleep didn't come.


	4. Trustworthy

And by the time the great city of opportunity finally gave Nick another chance, he really didn't want anything to do with it.

He'd sorted himself out. The new apartment wasn't exactly _nicer_ \- it actually had more drippy pipes to monitor - but it was in a quieter part of town, closer to the walls at Rainforest, with better access to the city center. And the popsicle thing was actually working. Every time he tried it, Nick was consistently in the black, even if it was just a few dollars a day. He had a feeling it might even be worth scaling up, had there been anyone out there he was even remotely ready to trust.

It was getting to the point that he could consider nice meals on the weekends again, or even blueberries when they were in season. There were a couple rooftops he still had good access to; in the summer evenings Nick found there was nothing better than parking up where he could see the city lights with a carton of fresh fruit to daydream and drift off to sleep.

His life wasn't perfect. What fox's would be, in this city? But it was getting better.

So it was karma, or something, that he just happened to be on the outskirts of Rainforest that night and almost crashed a ZPD sting.

There was a blue sports car parked on the other side of the street, mid-scale, much nicer than most of the vehicles in this neighborhood. But it drew Nick's attention more because it was drawing a lot of other attention: there were two weasels and an otter crouched on its sidewalk side, working furiously at something.

Nick picked up his pace, just a bit. He'd seen plenty of car theft in the last decade. They disliked spectators as much as any sketchy wolves lurking in alleyways did.

Worse, if he was right about that little bump suckered to the inside of the windshield and the subtle sticker on the corner of the license plate, this was actually property of Zootopia's finest. This crew apparently hadn't gotten the memo about the new honeypots, or the neat little perimeter containment ZPD tended to drop around them.

And normally they waited at least until it got dark to make their moves. Were they hoping to get in and out before the police were in position to stop them? It didn't seem likely. Nick ducked down the next little sidestreet, discarding plans to go find food somewhere out in the city, and could make out the familiar silhouette of a ZPD cruiser parked at the curb four blocks straight down. Yep - he should have stayed home tonight.

The big cougar came around the blind corner and nearly ran Nick straight over. A box of various car parts crashed to the sidewalk.

"Whoa! Sorry, friend."

Nick was looking at stereo head units, and radar detectors, and a couple of dash-mounted GPS screens. His stomach plunged.

"You all right?" the cougar asked. He had a smooth, measured baritone. Incongruous for a chop shopper.

"Fine," Nick said. He stepped aside to let the other start gathering the parts up again.

"Did Vau send you to help with the rest of this?"

_Vau._

Nick's tail bristled. If Skinner Vau was back out of hack and fouling up this part of the city, it might just bear moving again. It took a lot to make a name for yourself in Happytown, and none of what that ruthless badger had done to get there was good. Nick almost let the discomfort show, too. But ignorance had to be the reaction here.

"I'm just passing through."

The cougar stopped and looked up. A pair of tawny eyes frowned in confusion at the body language Nick couldn't quite control all the way. "My mistake."

_No,_ said the voice in Nick's head, _Your mistake was joining up with a violent street criminal who had to be just a few weeks out of jail._ And Vau's usual gang was a bunch of weasels and ferrets - really slippery characters. This cat didn't fit in at all. Something didn't add up.

He hefted the box back into his arms and looked past Nick, down the road to where the police car was parked, and went very alert. Nick followed his gaze. The cruiser was gone.

He wasn't undercover, then.

"I'd lose that box if I were you," Nick muttered, willing his heart slower. This was exactly where he didn't want to be. He'd seen the news reports, the warnings. Anyone so much as thinking suspicious things near one of these stings tended to get asked a bunch of difficult questions by the police springing the trap, just in case.

"What?"

"You want to get hauled in? Your friends back there are about to learn about ZPD's bait car program the hard way."

The cougar's ears flattened. He seemed to realize there was no sense in denying it. He backtracked alongside the low brick building and dropped the box behind a dumpster. "Not my friends."

"I didn't think so, but you're still running with them."

"For all of three days now. They said it paid well."

_Skinner Vau, paying his associates well._ "Please don't tell me you're that desperate." Why had Nick even made eye contact? Now they were stuck in a shrinking net, and unless they came up with something right now they were both going to get caught. "Come on."

They went further down the alley, Nick guided them through three right-angle turns and a gap in the chainlink the cougar just barely squeezed through, and then they were back on the main thoroughfare, headed north away from the hot zone. Just in time, too. Sirens started up behind them, and Nick heard the rev of engines and shouted commands. He pulled his ears forward and settled his expression.

Nick's companion - less practiced, jumpier - looked over his shoulder and gave a shaky exhale. "Thanks."

"First one's free, sandy." Nick was still looking around for trouble, just in case. "And you're on your own for the next one."

"Mercury. Mercury Caffrey."

Nick looked sideways. "Don't take this personally, Merc, but the less I know the better. I've always stayed as far away from gangs and gangmembers as possible. It helps my life expectancy."

That shut him up.

Nick could read mammals. It's what he did, to survive in a city that tended to ignore foxes under the best of circumstances. And this was all wrong. If Vau's gang had one hallmark past the wanton violence, it was that nobody was in unless they had no other choice. None of them were this healthy, or this well-spoken. They certainly didn't apologize for running down bystanders.

And against even his own internal protests that it was none of his business, that neither of them owed each other anything because that would imply some sort of trust - he heard himself asking.

"What, do you not know anything about Skinner Vau?"

"A story or two. I figured I would be able to take care of myself." Merc's tail flipped. "They needed someone with some presence, and they promised good payment."

"Vau promised you something, huh?" Nick was paying more attention than he knew he should now. The urge to drop it, to just _get out,_ was stronger than ever, but now he was committed. Angry. He picked up his pace. "It sounds like you'd be sitting on a curb with a taser in your face right now for your trouble."

Merc looked uneasy. "Listen, friend, if I had-"

"Not your friend," Nick said. "You should split before they come back around. Don't worry about how I rescued you, either. We're square."

He shook his head. "If I had any other choice I wouldn't be running questionable ops, either. It's not-"

Nick's ears caught rapid-fire _pops_ from behind them. He tensed. Tasers didn't carry like that. You needed firearms to make that kind of noise.

Mercury didn't just tense. He twisted all the way around to point his muzzle back down the street, standing dead in his tracks. His muzzle hung open.

"See?" Nick waved a paw.

"Shit." The cat's shoulders rose. He was breathing hard. "Oh, _shit._ "

The gunfire carried on, and Nick watched nearly six feet of musclebound cougar drop to his paws and knees right there on the sidewalk and start to shiver. His tail was wrapped around his waist.

That wasn't just unfamiliarity with guns. That wasn't even overwhelming surprise at the violence Vau's cronies swung to more often than not.

Nick had been an accidental speed bump at the perfect time, it seemed.

"Whoa, Merc. Hey." Nick looked around, even though he knew it was useless. As soon as this neighborhood heard a gunfight, it was going to lock all the way down. There was no one else out here. No cars on the street.

_And he could still walk away too,_ came the quiet, reluctant voice in his head. _Make it someone else's problem, someone else's poor decision._ he could leave this cat to his own devices.

But panic was making Merc show all of his teeth. His eyes were a long way away. His ears jerked with every report of the slackening gun battle. Nick stood there, where resignation was as binding as indecision, had to accept that this, too, was going to fall to him after all.

He _really_ should have stayed home tonight.

\---

It had been quiet for ten minutes before Nick made any progress. By then he was sitting on the pavement next to Merc, and by some miracle the cops hadn't swung out to pick them up. He was watching carefully as the cougar breathed.

He seemed to be counting. He was calmer now, even if his ears still snapped to every little sound around them. Eventually he raised his head and focused on Nick.

"Thank you."

Nick's mouth was dry. "I think it's kind of stupid to ask if you're okay."

"I didn't know," Merc sighed, almost to himself. He eased back onto unsteady haunches. "I didn't put it together. I thought maybe it wouldn't ever get this bad. Stupid." He looked across at Nick. "Listen, I think I owe you my life right now, and I don't even know your name."

So much responsibility. But Nick couldn't deny him that. "Nick Wilde."

"I'm sorry I just put you through all of this, Nick Wilde."

Nick watched the other get to his feet. "You all right to be walking around?"

"I definitely can't stay here." He rubbed his muzzle and looked shaken. "That... was a wake-up call. It hasn't been actual gunfire for a while."

"For a while."

The cat's ears dropped. "I was in the Peacekeepers for four years."

A couple of things clicked. "Oh."

"It wasn't bad," Merc said. He started down the sidewalk alongside and tapped his temple. "My VA therapist says I just can't always get my brain to remember that anymore."

He would draw a lot of attention just with his posture and presence. Nick... didn't react to that this time.

He held his tongue, too. Mercury had to know if he'd stuck with that little band of failures back there this would have happened just as quickly, and wouldn't have gone near as well. Vau didn't bring mammals on for their box-moving abilities.

It didn't make sense. Why would someone leave the military and sink straight to what was nearly the worst of the fringe? Who could wake up one morning with their support network wiped from the face of the planet, left to fend entirely for themselves?

That was how mammals broke.

_It was none of his business_ , he told the churning guilt. _None of his business._ If this mammal he'd met half an hour ago was going to get mixed up in that, Nick needed to just remove himself before any kind of collateral damage got to him. Before their problems became his problems. Before their decisions made him start feeling any more responsible.

It had worked before.

They made it to the end of the block that way. Nick turned to take a meandering route that wasn't straight home, out of paranoid habit. Merc seemed to sense it.

"Listen, Nick-"

"Don't worry about it," Nick cut him off again. "We both got out of it okay."

"You say it like it's no big deal, but I think the whole course of my life just pivoted thanks to you." He raised his eyebrows. "Gotta be worth at least one drink."

Here it went. Nick spread his paws. "Mr. Caffrey, I don't mind being able to help, but I'm really just a very lucky or a very unlucky spectator down here. I mean it when I say I hope you don't take it personally, but I'd rather just disappear back home before anything else can happen to me tonight."

The bigger animal watched him. "No, you're right. I can appreciate that."

Nick gritted his teeth. He had to do something. "Are you going to be all right?"

He nodded. "After what just happened? Count on it. I'll talk to the VA about sorting out my pension paperwork again."

Nick frowned. "Don't they owe you that anyway?"

Merc got a wry smile. "You've never dealt with the VA, I take it. I wouldn't have been down here if I hadn't gotten fed up enough to be desperate."

That was fair. "And tonight?"

"I live nearby."

"You didn't give Vau your address, I hope," Nick said. He put his weight on his back foot. "You really should get as far away as you can."

"I didn't. Seems I'm not that stupid yet." Merc hesitated, and held down a paw. "I'm going to remember what you did for me, Nick. It's going to mean something. Seriously."

Nick stared at it before he shook. It sounded dangerously close to a _promise._

"If you ever change your mind, look me up. I owe you."

Nick watched him go - in and out of his life as quickly and in about as surreal a manner as possible - and tried to put yet another complicated moment of perspective out of his head.

It was for the best this way.

His own decisions had swung him low enough to rock bottom, Nick knew. He wasn't about to risk whatever balance he had left. It would trigger more emotional investment and spiral wider and wider. Someone he'd known for half an hour didn't deserve to get close.

He'd found some equilibrium that worked. That kept him off everyone's radar, police and criminal underbelly of the city alike. He was surviving, just like he'd promised, and he didn't intend to risk that. Yes, there was more to life, but that was the storybook version. The award-winning movie adaptation. The simple fact of the matter was not everyone had the resources or the opportunity to find that higher plane.

And that was okay. He had his apartment, and his street savvy and his read on mammals that gave him enough to get by. He was smart enough to turn around and walk away from nasty situations. Lucky enough to be able grab the occasional carton of blueberries - on sale, even - and stretch out on a rooftop somewhere. It was a frame of mind. An understanding.

And when he held things that way, they still worked.

Flawlessly, even. Even two years later, during that part near the end where the landlord up and disappeared, and Nick decided looking elsewhere was going to be better than forcing the issue with the burly polar bear 'maintenance workers' who had shown up.

He'd spent a couple weeks under a bridge while he figured himself out again - and then Judy Hopps nearly turned all of that careful stability upside-down in two days.


	5. Judy

The strange part - the part that got Nick to stop wasting any time with preconceptions for good - was that it almost didn't work out.

Because it almost hadn't. He'd stood there in the mist of Rainforest District, watching her chief hold out his hoof for her badge, and had dared to think that maybe this time it was actually going to be different. He was watching a weird inversion of his own life play out on her face, and it was hurting his heart. She _had_ been brave, and loyal, and tried so hard, with every angle she could, to help. Because she knew it was the right thing to do.

Worse: he, Nicholas Wilde, had started to trust her. She'd saved his life, what, three times?

He'd probably saved hers, too, facing down that jaguar. He'd stood up for her, put his own neck on the line with the police to get her on that tram. He'd helped her navigate bureaucracy and underworld and the sewer systems at Cliffside, and he'd given her the confidence she needed to finish her job, to get her happy ending.

She'd given him an application, and that stupid little carrot pen of hers. She'd given him chance to turn his life around, to do more than just survive, to _mean something._

Nick - against a lifetime of experience and instinct - had started to hope.

And then she'd thrown it in his face, with earnest words and shallow excuses. Nick had dealt with that mindset for years, from all corners - but coming from her that simple ignorance and fear still somehow hurt more than any malice ever could.

Nick had trusted Judy Hopps. But it seemed she still didn't trust him.

All he'd had to show for his trouble was that pen, and the crushing suspicion that the lies he'd fed himself for two decades until he believed them - weren't lies at all.

\---

And that should have been it.

He should have gone on like that - burned, hard, one last time, the time that really mattered - but still alive, still surviving. He should have hustled pawpsicles until he had enough to retire, or something. The bridge wasn't that bad. Finnick was tolerable. There were still rooftops and blueberries to be had. Maybe it wouldn't have even mattered that the world was coming apart around them, predator by predator.

He'd seen the news, even as ZPD had tried to brush it under the rug as if nothing had happened. A leave of absence, they'd called it. Something temporary. He hadn't believed it. If anything, the news that Judy was gone just solidified what he'd told himself over and over again until it stuck. _Little rabbit couldn't hack it._ She'd tried, which was more than most of them ever did, but she couldn't fight the inertia that eventually dragged all of them along. 

She wasn't supposed to come back.

She wasn't supposed to be standing there one day atop his bridge, or making Nick freeze with the pain of hearing her voice crack like that.

Nick hadn't expected her to prove that both of them were still capable of change. That she hadn't wanted it to end any more than he had. That she wanted his help to do this again and do it _right_.

That she trusted him.

But there it was. And it was like she'd never left. He'd had his own chance to prove it, too. In the subway tunnels underneath the city, and when they faced down Bellwether together, and when he'd patched her up. When they'd put on the most dangerous play of their lives, and Nick had had to tap things deep inside, things that scared him because they were more true than he'd like. When it was all said and done she was still there, and Nick was daring to hope that the world had issued him a second chance without a single string attached.

\---

He was never going to forget their first time.

It was the most banal, mundane thing in their relationship so far, but a promise, no matter how routine, was a promise. None was less important than the others.

"And how's first aid?" Judy asked.

"Informative and just a little bit unsettling," Nick said. "Useful, for sure, but the clamps they showed off to stop bleeding in the big mammals give me the willies."

"It's efficient." Judy shrugged. "An elephant has a femoral artery as big around as my arm. It's not like pressure is going to work there."

"Gross."

"You're not going to wimp out on me now, are you?"

Nick narrowed his eyes at his phone's camera. "I think it's one of those things we hope we'll never need. They just have to play it safe."

"No, you're right. How's the food there?"

_"Seriously?"_

Judy laughed silently at him. She was kneeling somewhere up on the rooftop patio, it looked like. Nick could see sky behind her. "Our salad is coming along, is why I ask."

Nick was working too hard to let first aid queasiness get in the way of dinner. "The protein here is a little stale. They don't go in for fish. Not good stuff, anyway. Let me see the progress."

Her perspective shifted to the rear camera, and a neat row of leafy stalks climbing alongside their trellis. "There's not much to see, yet. There will be green peppers in a couple of weeks. You missed the flowers."

"What did they mean?"

Her view swapped back and Judy gave him a knowing smile. "I don't think bell pepper flowers mean anything."

"Everything you plant means something," Nick disagreed. "You told me that. Your daisies mean _simplicity_. These could mean _tasty lunch_ , maybe."

Judy laughed at him again. "You're making fun of me."

"Just a little bit."

"Now I wish they would be ready sooner," she said. "So you'd get a break from academy food. When you come in next weekend, I'll take you someplace nice. Sushi, maybe."

"Aw, Carrots. You'd do that for me?"

"Promise."

Nick's ears sharpened it. The word didn't come up often here. It certainly hadn't been directed at him. Police training was a bunch of legally defined rules and regulations. There weren't absolutes, or keeping of word, unless it was in the legal purview and obligation of a peace officer to do so. Not even Casset promised anything, even with her sharp rhetoric out on the field. Of course, her word was already law to the nuggets. Maybe that had something to do with it.

"You mean that."

Judy frowned at him. "Of course. Why wouldn't I?"

"Sorry," Nick said. He glanced around. It was quiet in the barracks, or quiet enough. Most of the others, with their larger stomachs, were still chowing down on the overdone bug burgers in the mess hall. "I grew up knowing something, is all. About promises."

He hadn't thought of his mother in a long while, and hadn't spoken of her to anyone else in even longer. Judy's field of view rotated as she sat back and looked down at the camera in her lap, with her chin propped on the fist that still held the weed puller. "What was it?"

"Well, you have to keep them if you make them." Nick rolled so the camera was facing into his bunk. "It's-"

It sounded cheesy.

"It's what?"

Nick thought of his mother; and of the reckless, shortsighted vixen he'd once known; and of the ominous wolf on the edge of Happytown; and of the look on Mercury Caffrey's face when he'd come out of it that night on the sidewalk, with gunfire going in his ears, and Nick was still there.

It sounded cheesy, but to this day it still wasn't wrong.

"You have to mean it," Nick said. "A promise the most important thing you can give someone else."

_Backed by the full faith of your entire relationship with that person._

"Well then I'll have to keep it, won't I?" She smiled at him.

"I'm serious."

She cocked her head. "So am I, Nick. You say this is important, I believe you. You will be back next weekend, right?"

"I will."

"Then I'm taking you to lunch," she said. Her paw drifted at the bottom of Nick's vision, where she was touching her screen. "It's a promise."

\---

Judy kept that promise. And the next one, and the next one.

There was no one big change. It was like sitting in a giant pot, with water getting hotter and hotter around him - but instead of boiling, Nick was approaching a truth he never would have thought himself lucky enough to experience before.

Their first night together was happenstance. Their first kiss was a shivering mess, coming off a case neither of them wanted to remember. Their first declaration of love was ceremonial. A formality. By then, they already knew.

And life was an endless series of risks he never wanted them to have to take, but he took them anyway. Nick watched Judy's back on patrol, even the risky ones that ended in chases that took them near his old stomping grounds in Happytown. He learned that no, she wasn't invincible. Unruly citizens got a little bit too close and knocked her off her feet, or landed her in the hospital and made him do his job without her support, where she couldn't watch his back.

They built their garden together, on the rooftop of her apartment, and filled it with life and love and little purple flowers and quiet domestic struggle and success. It bloomed and bore fruit and became an anchor; some place they could go to escape the rest of the world. Every harvest proved, more effectively than the last, that the work they put into their lives together was worth it. Tangible. Real.

They built a reputation as the strongest of partners and the most steadfast of ZPD's servants, even when it was hard, even when the rest of the city didn't see eye to eye with the fox and the rabbit. Awards rolled in, for valor or exemplary conduct. They weren't anywhere near as important as the looks Judy gave him in the cruiser right before they plunged back into public service, the ones that said _I've got you and you've got me._

They argued, yes. It wasn't always easy. Their inescapable differences saw to that. Sometimes they didn't share their beds for the night, or their couches, or even their apartments. Figuring out her family was hard. There were limits they discovered that they had to compromise for. But learning when to give each other space and time - that was part of being together.

Nick had never been an _inspiration_ before. For the first time in his life, with Judy's support, he had an opportunity to improve things for others: from the tourists who needed directions, to the little kits who got their frisbees stuck in the trees in the plaza outside headquarters, to the older ones like that raccoon lurking around the edges of the summer concerts, who just needed a bit of a nudge, a bit of advice to keep his life going in the right direction. Nick pretended not to notice the way Judy looked at him whenever it happened.

And they made love, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, deep into those nights after long runs or longer paperwork. On occasion it was hard. There were limits here, too, that they were forced to acknowledge to keep each other safe. But it was part of the process. It never ended in anything less than the shivering perfection of her breath against his nose, her warmth pressed close.

But most important, Nick had found someone to trust for the first time in his life, as deeply as he ever thought he could, and then deeper still. And when Judy turned it around and showed him just how much she trusted him, too - it made every false start and sacrifice and mistake along the way worth it.

Nick still stayed awake savoring it sometimes, when he couldn't believe his luck.

Like tonight, while they rested before their train for Bunnyburrow left in the morning. Now it was dark, with the lights of the building opposite and the sounds of the city washing through the open window of Judy's apartment. She was curled up against his collarbone in his arms, so close he could feel her steady breath against his fur. She was really asleep now, he judged, now that they'd finished work and eaten dinner and tended their garden and celebrated their connection as only they could.

"What are you thinking about?"

Or maybe not. Nick looked down. Her eyes were half-open where she'd raised her chin to look at him.

"How can you always tell?"

Judy blinked at him, slow. Deadpan. "I can smell the smoke."

There was no comeback for that except to smile down at her. He raised a paw against her cheek.

"Just memories. You. Growing up. My mother."

Judy knew what that meant. He'd told her. He'd shared, that, too. Now she pushed herself closer. "I love you."

"I know, sweetheart." Nick rested his nose against her forehead. Every day, he was so, so grateful for it.

"We should go see her," Judy said. "Before we leave. There's time, if we get up early."

His heart quickened, and he pulled her tighter. "We can take her flowers from the garden."

 _"Clover,"_ she whispered, and stiffened against him. "Oh, Nick, we have to. There's white clover blooming in the corners."

Her eyes had filled with tears. His confusion became understanding, though, as she wriggled far enough up to get her paws on his cheeks.

Judy planted the various flowers because they were pretty, and because they helped keep the soil fertile and rich for the foods they grew in their garden. But she knew what the blossoms meant, too - even the clover. Especially the clover. That one, she'd taken special care to teach him.

And now she was weeping against his forehead, and he was right along with her, squeezing her against him because right now, _nothing_ was close enough. Nothing felt more right in this moment than keeping Judy as tight in his arms as he could.

It had taken him so long to find her. It almost hadn't happened. And until he had, he hadn't understood what his mother had really meant, the night she said goodbye in the hospital.

She'd made him promise to do more than just survive. More than just keep his promises. She'd wanted him to live, and make it meaningful in the most important way he could. Inherent in promises was having someone to promise things to, and to receive them from. Having someone who he would want to share that commitment with, and who would want to give the same stability and comfort and trust back because they appreciated just how valuable it was.

Having someone to love.

And they weren't just white clover blossoms they would be leaving at his mother's grave the next morning. They were a physical reminder of what she meant for him, even now. What she had taught him. What he had learned and finally, _finally_ made good on and would share with Judy for the rest of his life, thanks to the love his mother had passed to him and trusted him with. They were a message.

_I promise._

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](https://falke-scribblings.tumblr.com/)
> 
>  
> 
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> 
> [chronology](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yPmpmdo39SmiRNC4BJVv2PAWi7fxBoP5FWba9n8s3qg/edit?pref=2&pli=1)


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